Tuesday, April 26, 2016

ISIL : The Beginning of Its End?

"Defeating
the formal military presence of a terrorist group will not
significantly mitigate the threat of lone wolf or small independent
cells that are based in the West.""You can defeat ISIS in ISIS-controlled territories, but you're not going to defeat ISIS itself. The ideology of jihadism continues to evolve and continues to exist."Jonathan Schanzer, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Washington

Various
intelligence sources and authorities have come out with definitive
statements that in their opinion the threat of Islamic State has been
vastly diminished, that they are simply at this point hanging in, still
successful in recruiting jihadis from foreign parts, but reeling from
the combined assaults that have hammered their forces in the past year.
Alternately, other sources express the opinion that there is no real
indication that they are losing critical ground, and they will prevail.

U.S. Defense Department officials have revealed that U.S. airstrikes
have killed 24,000 Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria. Millions
of dollars plundered by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and
placed in storage areas have been incinerated in those airstrikes,
striking a blow for the financial support of Islamic State purchasing
power of new weapons, and salaries paid to their fighters. Of the
territory that ISIL has captured in Iraq, 40 percent has been lost to them, along with a similar geography in Syria.

Those
are the setbacks that Islamic State has suffered, but it's hard to tell
how meaningful they are to its determination to continue advancing its
viral agenda of jihad. For one thing
the allure of Islamic State has continued to spread in Europe, in North
Africa and in Afghanistan. Attacks in Brussels, Istanbul and France
have stamped "approved" by ISIL to its loyal cells abroad who have struck out on their own with direction from ISIL which takes credit for all the bold attacks its followers engage in.

And while ISIL
may have lost a veritable fortune in the destroyed treasury it had set
aside, not all that much funding is required to advance strikes in the
West by ISIL
cells. The cost of the materials, as an example, used in the Brussels
attack and the laboratory that produced the explosives are estimated to
have been between $10,000 and $15,000 to fund. And while police and the
military in the West may realize success in shutting down some of the
cells, the idea that propels them cannot be shut down.

The
Islamic State is viewed as one of the wealthiest violently militant
groups ever to have surfaced, given its looting of $1-billion from
Syrian and Iraqi banks. That looted treasury has given it leeway to
mount spectacular assaults, such as the early April abduction of some
170 workers from a cement factory near Damascus.

According to authorities the efforts to both militarily shrink ISIL's
influence and dominion in Iraq and Syria and at the same time slash its
finances to deprive them of resources needed to continue to wage
conflict have each aided the goal to diminish ISIL's presence and capabilities. The retaking of oil fields and cities from ISIL
have struck a blow to its prestige and its finances. The U.S. air
campaign Operation Tidal Wave II has struck oil fields, refineries and
tanker trucks, slicing oil revenue for ISIL by a third.

A series of cities and towns have also been lost to Islamic State, finally taken by Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. airstrikes enabling for example, the retaking of Ramadi, a significant loss for ISIL, an impressive gain for Iraq. The oil refinery and northern city of Baiji is yet another loss for ISIL, as is their having been driven from the northern city of Sinjar by Kurdish and Yazidi forces.

Important ISIL leaders have been killed recently; its minister of war, Omar al-Shishani, and commander Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli,
as well as a chemical weapons specialist having been captured by
American Special Operations forces. That seems on the surface like a
series of losses, but at the same time there is the official
acknowledgement that it represents but a pause for ISIL; it has since replaced those leaders.

As for cutting the cash flow to ISIL: "There is no simple tool to separate ISIL from its vast wealth",
noted Daniel Glaser, U.S. assistant Treasury secretary for terrorist
financing. Iraq has been persuaded to prohibit bank branches in cities
and towns held by the Islamic State from making international transfers,
however, and that can be effective, coupled with the U.S. and European
countries and the UN adding people or companies associated with the
Islamic State to financial blacklists.

The proof of some measure of effectiveness of these initiatives can be determined by salaries for fighters in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria having been cut by half since last year. "These days, the situation has changed, and there is a shortage of money in Mosul", reports Ayham
Ali, a Mosul resident who sells prepared street food in Mosul. A
retired engineer in Mosul is also of the opinion that Islamic State's
influence is waning: "The corruption that ISIS is committing is the beginning of its end."

This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.